The Fabric of Society. State intervention, artisan agency, and the performance of textile manufacturing in the medieval Middle East

Abstract

In recent years much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of commercial institutions in the failure of the economies of the late medieval Middle East to keep up with Europe. In the first three centuries after the Arab conquests, the argument goes, international trade in the Islamic world was stimulated by the rise of a vast unified empire that removed trade barriers and by the favourable legal institutions that developed under Islamic law, in particular the arrangements for commercial partnerships and credit. However, in the late Middle Ages increasing political fragmentation was not, as in Europe, compensated for by ‘bottom-up’ institutions such as urban communes and merchant guilds. In addition, the legal institutions that had been so useful before gradually came to be handicaps. Islamic law did not acknowledge partnerships with a legal standing of their own, able to outlive the individuals who constituted the partnership. In combination with an egalitarian inheritance law this created incentives for keeping partnerships small, which in turn dampened the need for organizational innovations. While commercial institutions in Europe adapted to changing needs, in the Middle East institutional sclerosis hindered further growth...